What's On at UWA

Dr Sheree Smith is an academic from the discipline of nursing who has received a number of national and international research awards. Dr Smith is currently leading research capability development through an initiative with the respiratory and critical care nurses of the European Respiratory Society.

Information evening for future students to find out more about studying, Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (including music) at UWA. Individual booths on all the different majors and well as general overview information sessions at 5.30pm, 6.30pm and 7.15pm.

A 2 day workshop that explores everything "omic" that includes metabolomics, lipidomics, proteomics and structural proteomics. The workshop is relatively hands on and includes a lab walkthrough to see sample preparations.

Only $300 per registration (incl. workshop handbook & refreshments) Cost to students $220

VISCERAL: THE LIVING ART EXPERIMENT Science Gallery, Dublin present a SymbioticA Exhibition 28 JANUARY - 25 FEBRUARY 2011 Location: Science Gallery, Dublin

VISCERAL will confront audiences with the delicate processes of modern biology to explore our changing understandings and perceptions of life in the light of rapid developments in the life sciences and their applied technologies. A range of award-winning work from 17 different artists will challenge visitors to consider the tension between art and science and the cultural, economic and ethical implications of biosciences today.

Curated by SymbioticA’s Director Oron Catts and SymbioticA’s leading researcher Dr Ionat Zurr, VISCERAL will bring together more than a decade of work developed through SymbioticA’s art-science residency programme at The University of Western Australia. The exhibition also marks ten years of intensive and challenging work carried out at SymbioticA.

For more information visit: http://www.sciencegallery.com/ or http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/activities/exhibitions/visceral

The Curator's Choice exhibition invites a guest curator, this year UWA Cultural Precinct Director, Professor Ted Snell, to select the works from the City's collection, providing an opportunity for the community to view works from the City of Albany's Art Collection, and gain new insight into the collection.

Visceral: A SymbioticA Symposium 29th January, 2011 Location: Science Gallery, Dublin

From 28 January to 25 February 2011, SymbioticA will be re-located to Dublin, Ireland, where SymbioticA and Science Gallery, Dublin will host the exhibition Visceral: The Living Art Experiment.

As part of the exhibition, the Visceral Symposium will take place on the 29th of January 2010, and will review the cultural strategies that engage and scrutinise the life sciences, with a particular emphasis on hands-on artistic research embedded within a biological laboratory.

Art and biology, from a philosophical, art historical, geographical, political and scientific perspectives will be discussed by two of SymbioticA’s co-founders and some of the researchers who have been SymbioticA residents over the last decade.

Speakers: Prof. Miranda Grounds, Oron Catts, Kira O’Reilly, Adam Zaretsky, Meredith Walsh, Adele Senior, Deborah Dixon, Marta De Menezes, Tagny Duff, Jennifer Willet and Ionat Zurr

For more information visit: http://www.sciencegallery.com/ or http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/activities/symposiums

SymbioticA Documentary Screening; Location: Science Gallery, Dublin, Ireland

View a number or short documentaries about works developed at SymbioticA, including videos about the work of ORLAN and a the Critical Art Ensemble. The screening will be followed by a discussion led by Oron Catts.

More Info: http://www.sciencegallery.com/events/2011/02/symbiotica-documentary-screening

Discussion of India in the public sphere in Australia often focuses on the growth of the Indian economy, trade relations, and the emergence of India as a powerful economic and political actor within the international system. Less present in media and public discourse on India is consideration of social and environmental challenges, or even what could be described as crises, that are experienced most acutely by citizens located in the urban periphery and in rural areas. Questions of access to land for maintaining livelihoods and the legitimacy of land acquisition for development projects have emerged as arenas of local political conflict in India.

Water resources and their distribution are also not just a question of policy but of politics in urban and rural India, and will be ever-more so in the context of global climate change. The long-standing social crisis of rural poverty in India also remains unresolved, as attested by the disturbing phenomena of farmer suicide.

Three speakers, each of them distinguished experts and public commentators in India, will discuss these questions in this special lecture.

About The Speakers:

*P. Sainath is India’s most highly-awarded journalist. He is the Rural Affairs Editor of 'The Hindu'. Sainath was the first Indian in 25 years to win the Ramon Magsaysay Prize in 2007 for his “passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India’s national consciousness.”

*Swapna Banerjee-Guha is Professor of Development Studies in the School of Social Sciences, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. From 1981-2006 she was Professor of Human Geography at the University of Mumbai. She is the author of six books and over a hundred academic articles.

*Dr Anjal Prakash is Senior Fellow and Director of the Peri Urban Water Security Project at the South Asia Consortium for Interdisciplinary Water Resources Studies, Hyderabad, India. He has worked extensively on the issues of ground water management, gender, natural resource management and water supply and sanitation in India.

This lecture is free and open to the public, no RSVP required.

From the beginning of the twentieth century—when the great Australian novel, Such is Life, was first published—Australia has been transformed, with vast changes to society, culture and our sense of ourselves in an ever more international world.

In this lively afternoon seminar, four UWA writers and academics consider representations of a changing Australia against the backdrop of the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery’s current exhibition, Tom Collins and after: a bequest and its legacy.

Science, Art & Ethics Panel; Location: Paccar Theatre, Dublin, Ireland

Join us for a special discussion on science, art, ethics, and the sparks (and inspirations) that arise when the three combine.

A must-see for artists, curators, scientists, and anyone interested in cutting-edge use of biological materials, this panel discussion will bring together world leaders working at the interface of science, art, and ethics.

The panelists will address the ethical problems raised by using living material in art, the ethical hurdles of exhibiting with human tissue, and many more questions raised by the combination of new medical and artistic technologies.

Featured panelists include: Oron Catts, Co-founder of SymbioticA and previous exhibitor of 'Victimless Leather' at Science Gallery; Dr Steven Potter, the Georgia Tech Professor involved with Silent Barrage; Robert Devcic of GV Art, who's newest exhibit was recently featured in the Guardian; Michael John Gorman, Director of the Science Gallery.

This event is also part of the 2011 Trinity Arts Festival, Dublin, Ireland.

For more information visit: http://www.sciencegallery.com/events/2011/02/science-art-ethics-panel

Dr C. Donald Combs, Ph.D., Vice Provost for Planning and Health Professions at Eastern Virginia Medical School is visiting Perth from the U.S. Dr Combs oversees a medical simulation program and is responsible for the development of EVMS's new simulation center which will open in the summer of 2011.

Dr Combs will be providing a talk covering the Medical Simulation activities at his own simulation centre and a report from the Society for Simulation in Healthcare's IMSH meeting from New Orleans, Louisiana that he attended in January 2011.

Following a successful 2011 ARC LEIF bid, CMCA will acquire cryo-SEM capabilities this coming year, to provide improved imaging capabililties for hydrated and beam sensitive samples. Marilyn Carey from Gatan UK will present information on cryo-SEM techniques for those wanting to know more about cryo-SEM or SEM in general, illustrated with some fantastic images.

The high vacuum present in a SEM is a highly invasive environment for hydrated, low melting point and volatile specimens. Specimens of this type when placed into the SEM chamber readily collapse, providing little or no cryo-fixation. Such samples remain as close as possible to their natural state in the high vacuum of the SEM and allow their examination under the electron beam.

In addition, cryo-fixed samples can be fractured to expose internal microstructure and etched to enhance micro-structural detail, providing further information. To improve resolution further, samples may also be coated prior to imaging. The technique can be applied to a large range of samples with regards to both biological and materials applications.

The technique is simple and quick to undertake and provides high resolution data of value.

Presented by WestNet Infrastructure Group

At this breakfast noted author and social commentator Bernard Salt will be commenting on how social, cultural and demographic trends are impacting on Western Australia’s business future.

In light of Australia’s increasing and also ageing population he will discuss the effects this will have on housing, property prices, employment, skills, education, urban infrastructure, regional infrastructure, health care and lifestyle in Western Australia.

Bernard Salt is a best-selling author of three popular books on demographic change. He is a columnist with The Australian and Melbourne Herald Sun newspapers. He is a Partner with KPMG and heads a group of researchers providing demographic advice to business.

Bernard is also one of Australia’s most quoted social commentators. He regularly appears on many radio and television programs and he manages to combine an astute observation of human behaviour and change with hard data.

$45 Members /$55 Guests or $450 for a table of 10, includes a two-course sit down breakfast and presentation by Bernard Salt

Dr Gerald Crabtree is Professor of Pathology and Professor of Developmental Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is also an Investigator of Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Dr Crabtree's laboratory is studying the interaction between the signaling pathways and genetic circuits regulating embryonic development. To modulate and explore these circuits, his laboratory members are also designing and synthesizing small molecules that rapidly and reversibly activate or inhibit the products of specific genes critical to these circuits, thereby allowing precise temporal analysis of their functions. Dr Crabtree has published over 220 papers with many in Nature, Science and Cell.

Join artist Diokno Pasilan for a free child-friendly music workshop in his Memory House, an art installation alongside UWA's beautiful Tropical Grove, part of PIAF and the UWA Cultural Precinct's Dialogues With Landscape. Bring a picnic and friends. All are welcome. Visit website for the nine session times.

Melting glaciers are now revealing material evidence that reinvigorates longstanding oral traditions about human history and environmental change, posing new questions for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary collaborations. In this lecture, Julie Cruikshank, Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia will discuss how recent discoveries and collaborations among Aboriginal peoples and scientists reinvigorate discourses surrounding science and politics, concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ and how local knowledge is co-produced in such encounters.

This lecture is free and open to the public, no RSVP required.

Final Registration Reminder

The Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) and the Westerly Centre are to honour the work of Winthrop Professor Dennis Haskell with a symposium entitled 'Creative Writing and its Contexts'.

The Symposium will be opened at 5 pm on Thursday February 17 by the Vice-Chancellor of UWA, Professor Alan Robson. Professor Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, from the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will give a keynote address. ‘Sound and Sensibility: English Aesthetics and Minority American Identities’, explores issues to do with the ways American writers from other than Anglophone heritages deal in their writing with the physical, linguistic and emotional challenges of conflicted identities. Shirley Lim is the author of numerous scholarly works as well as a novel, books of short fiction and poetry. Her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands (1996) is perhaps her best known book in Australia. A new collection of poetry is about to be published. Readings by visiting and local poets will follow. Among them are Irish poet Tony Curtis, a winner of the Irish National Poetry Prize and author of seven poetry collections, the latest of which is The Well in the Rain; Andrew Taylor, author of seventeen books of poetry, the latest of which is The Unhaunting and John Kinsella, poet, novelist, critic and journal editor, author of more than thirty books. A celebratory function will then be held from 7.30 to 9.30. On Friday, February 18, there will be a full day of papers and readings, organised around the areas of interest to the symposium, which broadly reflect the areas in which Dennis Haskell has worked. They are Australian Literary Studies; Poetry and Poetics; Creative Writing, Theory and Practice and Australia and Asia. The opening address on this day will be given by Professor Bruce Bennett, Emeritus Professor in the School of Humanities at ADFA, formerly from UWA, who will speak on the ‘Civilising Value of the Humanities’. The registration form for the symposium is available on the Westerly Centre website, and more information about the programme will appear: http://www.westerlycentre.uwa.edu.au/

We look forward to seeing many of you at this event.

2011 UWA Gledden Visiting Senior Fellow, Alexander M. Puzrin, of the Institute for Geotechnical Engineering, ETH Zurich will present a lecture on the famous Leaning Tower of St Moritz. St. Moritz, Switzerland is a famous ski resort built on an active creeping landslide and the tower is the most striking evidence of this. In 1983 and 2005 the inclination of the tower was corrected using an original geotechnical solution: the new foundation is floating with the landslide, while the reinforced tower is placed on three bearings allowing for its vertical adjustment. This lecture will focus on the historical, engineering, legal aspects of this interesting case of geo-technical engineering.

The lecture is free and open to the public, no RSVP required.

Come and celebrate the year of the Rabbit with us!

Enjoy performances by Wenqin Arts Troupe, Zhejiang University PRC at the Dolphin Theatre, UWA on Thursday 17th February 2011 at 7.30 pm. $20 per entry and seats are limited.

Experts interpret the current state of research and exploration in a series of mineral systems and exploration-oriented workshops on the following deposit types; orogenic and intrusion-related gold, iron-oxide copper gold, Carlin-style gold and Cu-Mo-Au porphyry, regional-scale metallogenic features, nickel-sulphide and iron-ore. This course is available to industry participants as individual modules.